Free ARC: Under Nameless Stars by Christian Schoon

and fell toward the planet. Zenn watched the ferry grow smaller and smaller before it disappeared into the atmospheric haze.
    A moment later, another bell-like chime sounded three times. Far off in the depths of the ship, she heard the rumble of machinery – that would be the sound of the ship’s immense solar sails deploying, folding out like a vast, glittering gold umbrella with the ship like a handle in its center. Propelled by the solar wind, the huge sails would take the ship to the void between the asteroid belt and Jupiter, where the Indra and its groom would have the room required to commence tunneling.
    The panorama framed by the window slowly shifted as the starship veered out of Mars’s gravitational pull and began the slow ballet of orbital exit. She wrapped her arms tightly around herself and watched her world sliding away. She recalled the scent of fresh-cut switchgrass, of Otha waving at her as he drove his beloved old pickup truck into the cloister’s dusty courtyard, Hild’s weathered face glancing up from her workbench after firing up a near-dead diagnostic computer; Hamish in the brew house, holding four mugs of ale aloft in his four upper insectoid arms, saying he’d named this batch “Sexton’s Very Best Bitter”. She saw her mother and father laughing together, joking with each other the way they did, before… She thought of her father after Mai Scarlett’s death, the permanent cloud that seemed to veil his moods, even when he tried to make her think he’d found the trick of being happy again. More than anything in the world, she’d wanted him to find that trick, to have her father back, the father she’d known when he still had her mother to be so deeply, amazingly in love with.
    Mars continued to drift sideways in the portal, then vanished from view as the starship pointed its bow toward open space. The viewport filled with stars burning in the blackness, the nothingness shot through with unblinking, pinprick light-holes.
    She leaned against the corridor wall, and the ship’s mechanical systems thrummed against her back, beneath her feet. She had just two days before the starship would pass through the asteroid belt. Then, in the empty space that lay beyond, the Indra would work its uncanny sorcery. The immense “stonehorse” would awaken and uncoil its body into the cavernous Indra chamber. The groom would perform the arcane rituals of astronavigation, and the Indra would open the wormhole-like tunnel, dissolving the fabric of time and space. Once the interdimensional pathway materialized, the Indra would cross the threshold and, in an eyeblink, take the Helen of Troy across the unimaginable distance to Sigmund’s Parch and, in its next tunneling, onward to Enchara.
    So, she had two days before they would leave Sol Sys space. What if she hadn’t found her father by then? She couldn’t imagine where she would finally end up if she failed, what she would do, how she would ever get back home. And, she realized with cold, clear logic, if she didn’t find her father, none of the rest mattered.
     

 
    SEVEN
     
    Zenn was back inside the cabin a short time later when Jules returned, carrying a large tray draped with a linen cloth. Beneath the cloth was an array of plates and dishes containing pasta with a tomato sauce, various vegetables, half a loaf of bread and several other varieties of food Zenn couldn’t identify. Jules explained he had eaten while in the dining hall, and he now watched her intently as she ate, neither of them speaking. She devoured almost all of the food she could recognize, and some she couldn’t, until she was unable to eat any more. She put a small dish on the floor for Katie, which the rikkaset sniffed skeptically.
    Zenn waved at Katie to get her attention, then spoke aloud to her, talking slowly and exaggerating each word.
    “Katie? This is good food for Katie.”
    The rikkaset watched Zenn intently, then signed back at her.
    “Certain good? Good for